Journal: 06 / 2005

The original Drag-on Dragoon was misunderstood, most likely because people couldn’t decide if its title was a joke or not. Well, now, Drag-on Dragoon 2 is here, and it doesn’t suck. Join Classic Tim Rogers as he reviews the game in a few too many words.

It is a fact that most people just don’t get math.

I am lucky, I guess, to surround myself constantly with friends like Drew Cosner, who, when told 75% of the people in the United States of American can’t point out the North American continent on a world map, scoff, point fingers, and scream at me saying “there’s no fucking way.” Good people — people with rhythm. All good people have rhythm, or maybe that’s just how I think. Mentally incapable, am I, of understanding how a person can be handed two drumsticks, played a rock song, and told to keep a steady beat, and then just not having the power to do it. Yet I, at least, accept that these people can exist. Maybe that’s my curse; there was a television program on Japanese television (even they need to get with the program sometimes) just yesterday afternoon. I watched it while wearing a yukata and fanning myself with a hand fan, blowing the humid air around the room so it annoyed my companion (what else are companions for?), spread out on the straw-mat floor. It was a show about a little slobbery autistic kid who could play the piano. He sang in a little pipsqueaky voice and wobbled around. My companion says, look at that, it’s so tragic and so . . . cute. I grumbled and drank green tea. I told my companion I knew a kid in my special elementary school for geniuses who was autistic and weebly as hell, who knew all kinds of things about physics. I knew all the same things, and he once backed me into a confrontation wherein I, a boy who could tie his shoes and comb his hair, proved himself more valuable in the field of moving bodies. He was a little’un, and he started beating me on the shoulder with his fist. All was forgiven; mainstream pop-culture society had been good to me, back then, and I was courteous enough to consider his kind something that couldn’t be helped, and therefore, I might as well not hinder him by telling the teacher to call his parents. What would they do if they found out he got in a fight? Well, given his station, I took it they’d only love him more, and I didn’t wish that on anyone, not even spitefully.

Time got on, and by the time I was seventeen, I’d made a scene out of myself, and I wasn’t talking to anyone. It had been a couple of years, me in that state. I was in a calculus class with, among other people, my future friend Doug Jones’ future wife and future mother of his future children, Julie (then) Schimoller (now Jones). There was a kid in that class, one named Matt, autistic as tree bark and just as eraserheaded, always wearing purple sweatpants and muddied Payless Velcro Specials and bounding around with screechy enthusiasm. The boy was a fuck. Screechy and whiny; this is what happens when you love the autistic. The boy took all that love his parents gave him and channeled it into hatred for numbers. He had a theory for “triangle numbers,” something involving primes and . . . a certain curious triangular diagram. He sometimes would sketch it on the board before class began, and the teacher, a wonderfully real woman named Mrs. McDonald, who gave me Ds because I never showed my work because I never had to, then, at the end of the year, when I had regained my powers of speech after six years and had a little sit-down with her, one that involved her eating a turkey sandwich and my making a certain calculation, her raising her eyebrows and me grinning like a bastard though I’m really just a son of a bitch, went back and powered me up to straight As, saving the day. I didn’t know schools could do that. Percentages, in high school, are all just relative, anyway. Like scores critics funnel into videogame reviews, it’s all just about the feeling of the moment. Anyway, Mrs. McDonald, big-haired and Muppet-eyed, with a point in the center of her face that made her resemble a cocker spaniel in the right light, and I mean that nicely as I can, gently nicely, even, always struck me as a good mother for retards. Matt would scramle some bullshit up on the board, and though she held a masters in mathematics from Purdue University, she didn’t understand what he was getting at, and more power to her. She’d tell him, “Matt, erase that. These people don’t need to see that.” She said it like she understood, though she didn’t; I know this because I did, and I knew that no one who teaches math for a living, I mean, no one who lets their life slide down that hill and slot into that groove, would be able to understand what Matt was saying and not find it morbidly intriguing as all hell. Matt sat next to me in class, and would bubble like a lidded pot — twelve years old, and I was seventeen and the same height — whenever a student stood at the board trying to balance a rough equation. Sometimes he’d belt or bleat out something regarding where to put one number, and it’d ruffle my nerves. Sometimes he’d jump up and scream. Once he wrested the marker from someone else’s hand and tried to finish a problem. Mrs. McDonald — do you remember this, Julie? — screamed at him, “Stop it — or I’ll call Mr. Quandt!” Mr. Quandt was the principal.

“So it’s the same disease Dustin Hoffman had in ‘Rain Man,’” my companion said yesterday. The television program had pointed this out. Japanese television programs do this, sometimes — Japanese television viewers occasionally need movies as memory aids, you see. I said, “Yeah — though, well — . . .” How could I put it? “Dustin Hoffman was, first and foremost, just acting out a role. Second of all, his character was an idiot savant who had been treated like an idiot. Maybe that’s the best way to deal with those people.”

I was asked what I mean. I replied — “Because I’ve known what happens to these people when you let them think they’re hot. They grow up to be jack-offs.” I summarized Matt’s incident with the whiteboard and the marker. “Are you saying we should just ignore people with that kind of talent?” I tell her, “No, don’t ignore it — just don’t let them get a big head about it. These people aren’t built, wired for proper social interaction. You can’t give them too much confidence, or it ends up imbalancing everything else. See this slobbery little chap on TV — all you got to do is give him a piano. He sits there expressing himself, pleasuring himself all day. No one needs to jump in and hug him and tell him, ‘You’re perfect, you’re wonderful.’ I’m not saying negatively reinforce him — just don’t be overly positive.”

“You think this would help the world . . . how?”

“Simply. It would keep their talents pure and useful. If the kid was a computer programming genius, just let him mess around on the computer all he wants. Quietly contact some people, maybe with the CIA or NSA or whatever, and tell them, hey, I think my kid’s a genius. Then they take him aside and put him to work. They give him some discipline, give him a certain number of projects to work on a week. They don’t positively reinforce him or anything. They just keep him busy.”

“That’s terrible!”

“No it’s not — it’s humanity. We’re not meant to communicate and jerk each other’s egos around. (Heck, as far as I’m concerned, we’re not even supposed to have egos.) Think about the first caveman to kill the first wooly mammoth with the first sharpened stick-spear, and eat the first spit-fired mammoth rib. Was he thinking in words when he did all that? Did he need his woman to rub his shoulders and tell him she’s so proud of him when he brought it back to the cave?”

“Now you’re just being silly.”

“Maybe! Still — work is work. Tasks are tasks. Human beings have some sort of . . . click in their minds. Some sticking-point. We’re not goldfish — goldfish will eat all the food they happen across, even should that food kill them — we’re memory-possessing creatures with the darn-near creative power to know when to quit for a day. Even the autists have that. The ones who play piano, certainly, must even get tired of the piano after so many hours, and go take a nap. They don’t play themselves to death. Heck, I’d wager that most cavemen were autists.”

“Now you’re being even sillier!”

“I hate that word, ’silly.’ Anyway, maybe this autism is the way of the future. The way of the future. When everything is said and done, when technological devices shrink to sizes invisible to naked human eyes, when globalized economics have eventually, peacefully decided to quit promoting the behavior of selfish jerk-offs, we’re going to fall into a lifestyle groove wherein all we do is sit around entertaining ourselves all day. Think about it — how many more love stories need to be told in fiction and film before, you know, pretty much any situation any young man or woman with a fountain-pen fetish in love with the owner of a typewriter shop might need advising on regarding sex won’t be answerable by pointing to a shelf at a video store [or a search-engine-found index listing on a virtual video store]? The role of one human being to reinforce another is gradually fading.”

“What will people do in the future, then? Masturbate all day?”

“Yes — yes. Effectively, they’ll masturbate all day.”

She let out an ugly laugh. She thought I was being stupid. I was actually utterly serious. I’ve added up all this in my head. She’ll never believe me unless I show the work. Shit, showing the work takes so long. Even if she doesn’t understand the work, she’ll just look at a page of numbers, and say, “Yeah, that’s about right.”



Thanks to a punk-rock show, one Purdie Sakamoto (who might be my drummer again), and a girl who surprisingly wears thongs and candidly explains that they make her ass cheeks cold when she wears a skirt, I broke my cellular phone yesterday. I had been thinking of getting a PSP, to play all these bitching emulated games on it, though it looks like, now, I need to buy a new phone. Which is good. I wanted a new digital camera, too; my old one is just 3.2 megapixels. The new DoCoMo Foma 901ivSi phone has a camera with a manual-sliding lens cap; the camera mode is initiated within a neck-breaking .3 seconds of the opening of the lens cover. I did some practice in a cell-phone shop in Akabane today, one run by a baseball-loving middle-aged guy named Mr. Tanaka, who a little conversation revealed reads 2channel every night (I was carrying the “Denshaotoko” book with me, is how the conversation got started). I’d put the phone in my back pocket — he let me attach my dangly Dragon Quest Slime plush to it, which I always use to facilitate yanking the phone out of my pocket when it rings. I’m like a gunslinger. I flipped open the lens cap, aimed the phone, and slammed the button. Holy fuck, it’s fast. I’ll be able to take pictures of anything, and save them to a 256-megabyte memory card. The camera is an astounding 4 megapixels, with a lovely 20x digital zoom. The phone also browses the internet, contains the Final Fantasy VII Before Crisis game plus two Dragon Quests, is beautifully black, flips open with a button press without feeling awkward, has the biggest and brightest display of all modern Japanese cellular phones, and will only cost me 22,000 yen to start up. I figure — why not? I’m hardly . . . poor anymore. I will start it up once I get a few things in order.

This begs the question, however — why didn’t I just get my old phone fixed? Well, buckle up, gather around the campfire, and listen to this telling tale: to fix my phone will cost me 35,800 yen. I use the term “fix” lightly — there’s no fixing it. The thing got dropped into a motherfucking goddamn motherfucking toilet. Though it was only submerged in the water for one second, that’s enough to kill it for good. All my phone data is lost, including the fucking photo I took of myself and Sambo Master’s Takashi Yamaguchi live at Akihabara Station, though I guess I’ll have television to back that tall tale up come next week. I lose all phone numbers and email addresses. This is why my next phone will have some form of . . . removable memory. This is why I’m going with the Foma. Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked: my phone is dead, and I showed it to the people at the AU shop, and they said there was no reviving it. They told me, for 27,800 yen, I can get a new phone. I said, hell, that’s a lot. I sat and thought about it, and figured, okay, let’s get a new phone and get this over with. Then they said, well, in order to settle your account, you need to pay this last month’s bill. I did this, and for the most part, I have no regrets. Then they got down to brass tacks — basically, the 27,800 yen I have to pay for a new phone is a cost that floats on top of the value of a new phone. Phones that are usually zero yen at an independently-owned phone shop cost a minimum of 9,800 yen at the AU shop. This makes the hypothetical phone I would get cost, roughly, 36,600 yen. That’s a bit expensive.

Look at this, though, the guy says to me, scribbling on a sheet of paper — you’ve been on your current plan for ten months! This means you have 500 “AU Points.” He points to a diagram. The diagram says that 500 AU points is enough to get 1,000 yen off any new phone of my choice. This makes every “AU Point” equal to roughly 2 yen. However! It’s worth noting that “AU Points” are redeemable only in packs of 500. In other words, in twenty months, you’re awarded 2,000 yen off your next phone.

The math gets better — if you accumulate 700 AU Points, or use your phone for thirteen months, whichever comes first, you’re thereafter permitted to get any new phone for just 9,800 yen (plus the price of a new phone!). The problem is, you can’t use 700 AU Points until they mature into 1,000 AU points. And you can’t use a thirteen-month contract as leverage until you’ve passed the twenty-four-month mark.

Is everyone getting this?

How does one earn “AU Points,” you might ask? By using the phone a lot, sending lots of emails, browsing the web, and otherwise being an unthrifty customer? Of course not! You are awarded fifty AU Points a month, bar nothing. In other words, two months gives you a hundred AU points. Ten months gives you five hundred points, which mean nothing until you’ve been at it for twelve months. Twelve months gives you nothing; you have to roll over to thirteen.

All these numbers and fucked-up fractions exist for one reason, objectively — to confuse people. The average person doesn’t get it; they look at the chart, and think, oh, fuck, not a chart, I just want the phone already so I can start taking pictures of my cat and sending them to my boyfriend. And they sign the papers, and they do what they do. You’d think AU could at least award girls in hemp skirts who get drunk with their girlfriends and send photos of their cats to guys they want to be their boyfriend, by giving them extra points every time they spend 141 yen to send a hi-res photo (because there’s no USB interface and you can’t get the images onto your computer). Well, of course not. This is Japan; the consumer is not awarded, s/he is rewarded.

What the world needs is less positive reinforcement and more people saying, hey, this is what is going on. This is how much money you’re going to spend on your phone bill. This is what you’ll have to pay each month. Instead, they have this “packet system.” One email “packet” is 128 characters; yet your emails can contain up to 256, normally, or 512. You’ll pay for two packets — seven yen each — if you write more than 128 characters. Write 127, and pay 7 yen; write 129, and pay 14. It adds up, until it folds in on itself and you’re paying for 256 packets though you only ever wrote 128 129-character emails in one month. The packets don’t roll over, nor is your email sent-box combined packet usage counted up at the end of the month. Though there is this option to “make packets free.” This costs you an extra 2900 yen a month, which probably isn’t worth it, unless you have fingertips the size of toothpicks and type approximately forty-eight three-packet emails a day. In signing an AU phone contract, you have to endure this horrible discussion of the packet system, wherein the salesman sighs and taps a board with a pointer, exasperating himself and you, with the aim of making you think he’s talking about a good idea. What they need to do is get some sense of entreprenuerial trust, hide the math, and let people write all the emails they want for a static fee. The world is getting down to this; it’s just taking its time.

American television commercials have long done this; they’ve kept the math out of the way of the public eye, all the while telling the public, hey, we’re keeping the math away from you. “I’m not going to pay a lot for this muffler,” say the guys in the commercial. That’s right! You’re not! They explain, no nonsense, “We will give you a new muffler for $50.” Then you go to the store, and the guy says, “There’s a better muffler for $60.” You say, “Well, why’s it better?” And the guy tells you, “It’s made of harder steel. You want to ping it with your finger?” You ping it with your finger and it sounds like a chime at a Buddhist temple in Tibet. You ping the other one and it sounds like a kid kicking a Coke can. You cock your head right, then left. “Hell, let’s go with the more expensive one.” The key ingredient to this math problem here is that pinging it with your finger and listening to the austere sound it makes has nothing to do with how the muffler is going to keep your car quiet and filter nasty fumes into the tranquil world. It’s not performance-based. It’s something a salesman sets on a table and says, “Look at that.” It’s something the customer reaches out and touches out of curiosity. It’s curiosity that makes him buy the more expensive muffler. Though if he wants, he can get the one on the commercial, and the salesman nods wisely at the decision — hey, it doesn’t matter anyway; we’re all going to die someday, and ninety-nine times out of ten, it ain’t going to have anything to do with mufflers. You get the thing strapped in and putter down the highway on the way home and pick up a lottery ticket at the supermarket for a dollar. It’s the tax-free millions lottery. According to the television commercial, if you win this jackpot, you get a million dollars — no tax deducted. You don’t even hesitate to think this is impossible. Chances are, you don’t need to know that the grand jackpot is actually significantly more than a million dollars, so as to allow the proper authorities to deduct enough, making it total down to exactly $1,000,000 on the big cardboard check. There are men in purple sweatpants and slippers, I’d like to dream, working in the paper-pushing department of every company that requires geniuses, constantly being asked to do mundane things like figure out exactly how big a lottery jackpot should be for the state of Illinois so that, when income tax is deducted as per the traditions of the Great State of Illinois, it will equal down to exactly one million dollars. The little four-eyed eraserhead hems haws jumps up and down runs in a circle and spits out the answer, followed by a lengthy discourse on large prime numbers, during which he is snickered at and told to have an early lunch break.

There are whole rooms full of these people in certain places; I looked at myself one day, at age eleven, and thought — that’s what I’m headed for, whole rooms full of people who will punch me for being smarter than them, just because I can be smarter than them and tie my shoes at the same time. It’s a funny thing, me and math. I have numbers going on all the time. I count everything; the closest thing I have to religion is my mathematician’s belief that anything can be counted. How many rings are on a car of the Saikyo Line on a Sunday afternoon? Ten in front of each bench, one bench between each pair of doors, four in front of each of the priority seats, two perpendicular to each of the priority seats . . . all this is relative to, of course, how many benches and priority seats are in each car. Which is relative to how many doors the train has in each car! Each car has eight doors, though only four ever open at once because the platforms tend to all be double-sided, allowing for another train. The answer, then, is that Sonic the Hedgehog could, if he paid enough attention to detail, if he moved one car for between every two stations on a Sunday afternoon Saikyo Line Express train bound from Omiya to Ikebukuro, score twelve extra lives and have twenty rings left over. Unless the two triangular rings by each priority seat don’t count, because they aren’t round; or the eight green rings near the back-facing priority seat of each car don’t count, because they’re green. This subtracts exactly one extra life from Sonic at the end of his trip; that’s eleven lives, which is a nice prime number. Though I do believe the bigger question is, how many times does the Saikyo Express stop between Omiya and Ikebukuro?

People don’t need to make note of things like this while they ride the train. I think about it because I like making simple things complicated. It’s my own special kind of masturbation; writing can never be masturbation for me, because I never feel tingly about it unless I’m sitting in a weird position and my leg falls asleep (kidney problems lately). There was a kid on the train being led by the hand by his mother, looking up and counting all the rings; no one was holding onto the rings because everyone was sitting down. I was in car 6 of 10; he had just counted his 717th ring, out loud, wearing a little blue baseball cap. I tried to work out what he was — autistic, retarded, or just dumb and too doted upon. There are many ways to count a thing; a normal man does it with his fingers, an autist does it with his eyes, a smart man does it with a calculator, a pen and paper, or his mind, and a retard does it one way, with slobbering hands in his mouth touching each of his teeth, as I’ve seen one do it in my lifetime, also on a train, also in Tokyo, and that train line stops at a zoo, which is where this fully-grown retarded man and his fully-grown father, who has every right to be tired and retired, enthusiastically pulled him off the train with a word about “pretty giraffes.” He was going to have his hands full. My god, looking at the two of them almost made me cry. I remembered some kind of art at that moment, and it made me feel really, truly terrible. I remember a girl who said to me once, “Loving someone is seeing what they see, and hearing what they hear.” This is why, if she had that beautiful Foma phone, she’d send pictures of every two interesting fire hydrants or unexplainable clusters of eleven manholes she came across, pitching packets of seven kilobytes out into the brick wall of the unknown, smiling that she was bringing someone something wonderful.

Yet I knew she was wrong; as a person with a kind of a mathematical mind, I knew that if love meant seeing what the person you love sees and hearing what they hear, then, by her definition, two people in love, if they behaved like lovers in movies do and stared lovingly into each other’s eyes, would see nothing other than their own faces. A man looking at a woman who loves him, if she is looking at him, would be seeing himself; a woman looking at a man who loves her, if he is looking at her, would see herself. Would this not translate all sex into masturbation? Should I love you, my dear, and should you love me, when we are apart, should you be reading my words in a letter while I walk the world, I will collide with the walls that stand before me and walk off piers that stretch in front of me as I scan my own writing for typos. In your presence I could not refrain from looking at you, and even then I would only see my own eyes, which would make me masturbating. I could only see you if you looked at yourself in the mirror, which would make you a narcissist. Loving you is, then, just not mathematically practical.

There was a girl sitting across from me on the train with fair skin and a nice white camisole. She had been leaning on her boyfriend’s shoulder for the first ten minutes of her ride. When the ring-counting boy came through with his mother, her boyfriend woke up, bid her farewell, and left through the doors on the right. The little boy walked between us, counting. The girl stared at him with this repulsed expression that wrinkled up the middle of her face. What a pretty face, even when wrinkled. She had a Gorbachevianly huge, fresh scab on her knee. The blood must have been gloppy. I liked how her face didn’t reflect any of the light. I went on reading my book and she went on looking at me. I looked up at her and narrowed my eyes, giving her a look like you don’t want to go here. How many times do I have to refuse someone with shiny forehead skin because her forehead skin is shiny, or scrambled teeth because her teeth are scrambled, or a flat chest because she has a flat chest? This girl didn’t know the answers to any of those questions, and never will I. I just kept thinking she had no right to look at me like that. I sat there reading my book, entertaining the fantasy of going up and telling that kid, hey, there are 1,220 rings in this train. Do you know that or not? In my fantasy, he looks up at me, and tells me, in English, “Fuck off, of course I know it. I’m just affirming the calculations of the mind with experience of the fingers. I am, after all, still a child.” I then pat him on the head, which is impossible because I hate children so (diseases, et cetera).

I’m a man of the future.

I think of something brilliant to prove how I’m a man of the future, and I come here to fix my iPod and write something about how I’m a man of the future, never hurting anyone, and instead, I write an email to Drew about my phone’s death, which isn’t even about the phone’s death, it’s just this one sentence:

“if immortals (as in highlander) really existed, and they started jumping in front of trains as a form of thrill-seeking (slight possibility of decapitation, et cetera), do you think they would get arrested?“

We all do strange things sometimes. His reply is:

“ok”

That just about settles it. I have Katamari Damashii 2. Yes, I know that’s not its real name. I think I’ll play it a little bit. I mean, why not?

GOD HELP ME I CAN’T STOP EATING GRAPES Probably the most sickening thing I saw while I was growing up in Michigan was a colony of ants festering over a dead bird, carrying parts of it in a line back to the anthill. I must have been around six or seven years old at the time, and I ran away, screaming. One end of the driveway to the other in the blink of an eye, I was. Of course, curiosity always wins with kids in the end, and I inched back, taking smaller and smaller steps the closer I got.

I would have flipped over the body with a stick had I had one, but alas, no implements were at hand. I could only watch; I certainly didn’t enjoy having ants crawling up my arm, especially right after they had been all over a dead bird. Matters only got worse once the sun was high enough in the sky to bathe the carcass in a yellow glow. The smell was absolutely terrible.



I decided, in a fit of boredom, to start playing Pokemon: Fire Red today. For those of you who don’t keep up with the latest in children’s video gaming, Pokemon: Fire Red is a remake of the original Pokemon: Red from the good old Gameboy days. Supposedly, after the original quest, you can move on to new regions and other Pokemon, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. This time around, I chose Charmander as my starting Pokemon. Usually, I go for Bulbasaur. As a Grass Type Pokemon, he has the biggest advantage against the first Gym Leader, Brock.

Bulbasaur is generally regarded as the best Pokemon for beginners, while Charmander really comes into his own towards the end of the game. The problem with Charmander is that he is a Fire Type Pokemon. Brock uses only Rock Type Pokemon. If you’ve ever tried to set a rock on fire, you might see where this is going. The end result is that Charmander is completely ineffective against Brock’s Pokemon.

So you need to capture other Pokemon to do the job for you. One of the ones I always use is Butterfree, who evolves from Metapod, who evolves from Caterpie, one of the first Pokemon you encounter in the game. Butterfree has an attack called Psychic which pretty much ensures a one-hit kill against all of the opposing Pokemon in the first gym. This time around, I caught myself a Mankey. Mankey is a Fighting Pokemon, and I took a gamble on him; I wasn’t sure if Fighting would be effective against Rock.

It was.

But this isn’t a chronicle of my own Pokemon adventure. It’s about ants carrying off pieces of a dead bird. In a world where bugs are easily the same size as many of the other lifeforms, how does the food chain work? Animals that would normally be considered parasites are now predators.

In other words, who carries off the pieces of the dead birds?

The question in itself, of course, a loaded one. In the world of Pokemon, Pokemon never die. They all get knocked out in fights - though what happens to them after that, I have no idea. I won’t lie to you though - I don’t think about piles and piles of unconscious Pokemon lying in the tall grass where I grind out levels before the boss fights that lie ahead. I only think of that little experience bar under my Pokemon’s health, slowly filling up. That blue bar moving ahead represents movement towards new techniques, towards evolution.



A long time ago, someone I knew told me about how he had used his sister’s Gameboy to play through Pokemon to about the end of the game, when the opportunity to capture Mewtwo (Pokemon #150) would present itself. Once he captured it, he would then transfer the Mewtwo to the Pokemon game in his own Gameboy. Then he would restart the game on his sister’s Gameboy and start again. Using this method, he was able to get 6 (a full party) of Mewtwos.

After telling me this story, he told me about how his sister then played through the entire game herself, and got a full party of Pidgeots (the final evolution of a very common Pokemon). He then proceeded to battle his sister’s full party of Pidgeots against his full party of Mewtwos. All the Pokemon involved were at the maximum level. The Pidgeots knocked out all the Mewtwos, one at a time, one per turn. Such a humiliating defeat had never been witnessed in the world of Pokemon. That Mewtwo, the supposedly most powerful Pokemon, could be defeated by such a base Pokemon as Pidgeot, was completely unheard of.



Six Mewtwos lay unconscious in the tall grass, and my character walked right by them without so much as even a first thought, to say nothing of a second. Where were the ants, I wondered?

I have had my advance copy of Killer7 since . . . oh, about the middle of May?

I just started playing it last night. Yeah, I’m a bad “game journalist,” I know.

Holy shit.

Let’s write the first sentence of my review right now, and then write the rest later:

Killer7 is a videogame in which you push buttons.

HELL YEAH!! This game is the fucking revolution. I will . . . play it more. So far, I’d recommend it to anyone. Import the fucking thing if you have to!! For the love of God!

Edit: Actually, a quick search on Gamestop reveals the game releases on July 6th, so . . . rather than import it, just wait two weeks. Oh hell!!

Some or many of you might know about a Japanese internet messageboard known as “2channel”. If you go to www.2chan.net, well, you’ll see that it’s rather pink; if you go to 2ch.net/2ch.html, you’ll see it’s rather white. They’re not the same board, I point out, for clarity, though they’re both representatives of the same idea. 2ch is the bigger one, and the one that has all the influence. 2chan is more of a haven of otakus, though I wager anyone who browses either board, and a lot of people browse both, is something of an otaku. On either board, it’s common to find people talking about strange experiences they’ve had in their local Japanese town, and maybe lying. These people who read 2channel, while on 2channel, talk about their public lives; meanwhile a lot of Japanese people who don’t read 2channel talk about 2channel in public these days. A lot of people were talking about it a few years ago, though they’re talking about it even more, now. Up until now, I think more Americans talked about it in mainstream media than Japanese media, which might or might not surprise someone. I mentioned 2channel to a Japanese officewoman a year and some change ago, and she replied by telling me, “That place is demonic. Just thousands of people, anonymously . . . talking. They talk about the most horrible things. There’s probably — there’s probably something on there written about me!” I think she was thinking a little too self-importantly. I’m certain there’s nothing there written about her. She needs to relax and grow up a bit. On 2channel, people lie about lots of things, like the beverages they’re drinking at the very moment. Kevin Gifford, who runs a website at Video-Fenky.com, has a link to 2channel on the sidebar of his page, coupled with the quote “Hard for people who can’t tell when a lie is a lie.” That’s a quote of, I guess, something someone on 2channel said about people on 2channel. I think to quote this and think it’s helping or attracting someone is missing the point. 2channel is a notorious hive of tricksters and liars, yes; it is also a place people go to compare lists of their favorite computer and video games, or top episodes of historical television shows (or photos of plastic Gundam models and screen captures of the latest pornographic adventure/simulation games). They comment on each other’s selections in cryptic words and ascii character combinations that only other 2channel regulars or veteran codebreakers can understand. Unlike other internet forums, where people have screen names and avatars, 2channel is chaotic anonymity. This accounts for a lot of the lying, as well as the saying of things that the majority of Japanese people wouldn’t say in public.

It was once rumored that 2channel users could be, essentially, anyone you pass on the street in Tokyo. A normal-looking businessman, a schoolboy with a crew-cut head — either of them could, theoretically, browse 2channel at night, posting pictures of cartoon penises. Because of this kind of thought-universal power, 2channel was able to stir up three or four controversies over the last few years. A wheelchair-bound Japanese celebrity once sued the maintainers of the board for slander, because someone had told him that people were poking fun at him on the board, posting caricatures of him which were composed out of letters and numbers arranged with meticulous attention to page borders. A women’s mahjongg league also once tried to sue 2channel — this was because a thread on the site had, at first subtly and then eventually with the throwing around of many big words, insinuated that all female mahjongg players in Japan are lesbians. None of those crying libel, or slander, or whatever, were rewarded in any reasonable way; as 2channel users are anonymous, no single culprits could be pinpointed. Furthermore, judges raised questions of how much, exactly, it matters if someone says something bad about you. Be aware that a 2channel celebrity-ribbing is not like on Saturday Night Live or something; it’s not a famed comedian giving a precision-crafted, politically correct, subtle impersonation. There are whole boards devoted to individual celebrities, and the unkind words are most definitely not kind. It’s more like people saying, and I’m sure I quote, “Yeah, look at this new picture of Utada Hikaru. She’s so fucking fat. What is she doing, eating the Nintendogs?” No one can argue with any of these things because, frankly, they don’t know who they’re arguing with; I personally find anonymity a breeze in public settings. When someone doesn’t know your real name, they can’t argue with you effectively. They lose their grip, and stutter. Experiment, and then discuss.

If someone on 2channel slanders you, what do you do? Do you demand justice, or just take it in the back? The Japanese world is learning to take it in the back. If celebrities can’t stop it, no one can. At least that’s the mentality in this fame-based age. None of the backlash against 2chan did more than ignite and entice the public’s knowledge; the ranks of nobodies swelled with the typed words of curious newbies. Soon, the newbies were hooked, and as such, they were far more than people imbued with the power of freedom of speech; oh, no, these are people whose social development is so above and behind knowledge of one’s right to freedom of speech as to make them aware of the power held by an anonymous sounding board in the world’s least anonymous society. They steadied their aim at changing the world. Only they didn’t try to change anything big. Rather than push for cheaper soft-drink prices or more economical environmental policy, 2channel members famously united to spam the website of Korean-born fast-food chain Lotteria, effectively forcing them to produce a milkshake flavored with kimchee. Kimchee is a common Korean food consisting of cabbage scraps soaked in vinegar and savory spices. It does not make a good milkshake; Lotteria, however, was asking for suggestions as to what their next milkshake should be, and the 2chan users thought it would be hilarious to suggest, by the millions, a kimchee shake. They ended up not winning; however, moved by the spirit of the endeavor, Lotteria manufactured enough ingredients for a few thousand kimchee shakes, and then sold them at five Lotteria locations in Japan. Me and my main man Chuck Franklin ate the shakes at the Ikebukuro Sunshine City location. Holy hell, it tasted terrible.

Between then and now, 2channel has pulled such ill-defined pranks as enlisting a Chinese-speaking member to write the words “Be nice to Japan, or I won’t like you anymore” on a photograph of a morbidly large-breasted eleven-year old model, Saaya Irie; they posted this photo on Chinese message boards — this was around the time China, those human-rights-lovers who keep Tibet imprisoned and test nuclear missiles right off the Taiwanese shore, suddenly lashed out at Japan for not keeping their middle-school history textbooks accurate. One 2channel user, I believe it was, commented that maybe we shouldn’t tell twelve-year-old middle-schoolers about rape and carnage even if it is history. Either way, this was lost on China, just as the motives for the alteration of the photo of the little girl were lost on, well, anyone to whom thoughts occasionally occur. Either way, the use of the photo spawned stories in international publications; the readers probably figured, “Those crazy Japanese!”

2channel’s wild, reckless influence over the backgrounds of Japanese mundane every day life is starting to slow to a crawl. The users have settled down, and anonymous though the scores of them continue to be, they have more or less revealed what they are. They are — and I am not kidding you on this — honest, sincere people who happen to pay attention to things. I have harbored this hunch since I first found my way into 2channel and started posting — I guess it was about three years ago. A lot of the people I encounter on there strike me as good parents. I feel a chill whenever I say something about Romancing SaGa and get a comment like “Yeah” from a guy with no name, and I think, he’d probably do good raising a child. On 2chan, we’re all each other’s children. I saw a woman on the train a few days ago, with a CD player in her purse, and she took the CD player out to change CDs. It seemed she had rented two CDs from Tsutaya (Japan’s Blockbuster Video). One of them was a Duran Duran greatest hits, and one of them was Yo La Tengo’s newest. You know, CDs would be so much cheaper than, say, 3200 yen each if they didn’t allow rentals. It’s so . . . reasonable, isn’t it? So this woman looked at me with icy eyes, stood up, and moved to the bench across the train car. What a joke! I didn’t say anything to her — I was just curious! I looked at her damn CDs. She doesn’t have to be such a jerk-off about it. I figure, if she has kids, they’ll be just like me. Just like me.

The people on 2channel pay attention to things. They have hobbies like anime or manga and they pay loving, damn-near compassionate attention to them; suddenly, these days, what with articles about Japan’s “geek mecca” Akihabara appearing in the Washington Post, everyone is enlightened to this race of young Japanese men in glasses who sit in cafes occasionally and are served by girls in black gothic maid costumes. They have soundbites from the men themselves, saying self-indulged things like “Everywhere else, we are hated and hunted. Here, we are alive, and fluorish.” I read things like this, and wonder if there’s either some journalistic embellishment going on, or if the men being interviewed are letting their internet personas take over. Actual posting on 2channel, I have learned in three years of more-than-slight interest and participation, is a phase for most of its users. The insertcredit.com forums are rife with mentions of users meeting one another in real life, eating together, and getting together at E3 to see “Star Wars.” 2channel users don’t go in for this sort of thing; some may call them the world’s most hopelessly absorbed-into-the-Matrix geeks. I call them people who are strikingly able to seperate fiction from reality, yet mischievously conditioned enough to act like a cartoon character when a reporter for the Washington Post comes around with a translator, asking questions.

It is perhaps their current doings that are more fascinating and flat-out admirable than the immaturities of the past. To wit — the “Happy Ready Go! Campaign”. The Oricon, Japan’s conglomerate of Top of the Pops and the Billboard Top 40, is all about pushing shitty music. They make their living manipulating money. As Hollywood is little more than a specialized bank that invests in properties like “Casablanca,” letting them continue to mature and make money over decades and possibly centuries, the Oricon chart is little more than a loan shark for people who like to think they can sing. There’s a band called “Orange Range,” for example, probably one of the worst bands that has ever existed in any country and any language, with whisper-sung vocals, the tritest lyrics ever put into words, a rough-looking, goateed member who pretends to rap with the gusto of a little boy with a hero he’ll never meet, and really, really muted cymbals. A friend at Sony Music, Orange Range’s record label, tells me that Sony poured a good ten million dollars into promoting Orange Ranger’s latest album, and the investment paid off. They topped the charts and were featured on television and in this really sappy movie about a man whose wife is dead, who meets another woman in a really scenic, green place where everyone wears white shirts, and ends up making theaters full of old Japanese ladies cry. Yet the kids buy the music, and no one knows why. This is because there is money in the right places, making it so that ignoring Orange Range will result in broken kneecaps. Everyone is aware of this information. It’s infotropism: when Orange Range is in the room, everyone turns to look at them, just because.

Yet there are measures in place to prevent the public from looking elsewhere. A few weeks ago, a “character song album” — that is, a collection of slopped-together songs sung in the voices of characters from a popular animated series — reached the number-three position on the Oricon charts. The anime is called “Mahou Sensei Negima,” and it’s a fairly popular story about a guy who finds himself in the presence of a lot of girls. Cookie-cutter stuff; it’s the Japanese animated equivalent of a sitcom, basically. Evolved and revised and . . . changed around a little bit, of course. Anyway, this album rightfully and objectively reached number three on the charts of its own merit. Yet, when it came time for the weekly Saturday night album countdown, all the television programs that source the Oricon completely ignored the character song album. Number four on the charts replaced number three. Number five replaced number four. And so on down to number forty-one replacing number forty. That there are no other anime character song albums in the top forty aside from the one that placed number three is interesting enough. That they would choose to ignore an album based on its genre is another, sadder fact. Those of you who troll internet forums and IRC channels and think that Japan likes anime, or that it’s normal here: be warned that you are wrong. I will link this article again, because I don’t know of anything else quite written on the subject of how Japan hates anime. Read that, in which I take the stand that Japan needs to make anime treasures — yes, true, wonderful works of anime that stand head and shoulders above other Japanese animation — available to consumers not willing to spend 40,000 yen for the first three hours, and then get back to the next paragraph, where things get interesting.

So, what is the underground rabble doing to try to change the blind eye pop-society is turning to Japanese animation-themed music? Well — this is the most interesting thing that’s happened to popular music for, hell, ten years, at least. They are pushing the next “Mahou Sensei Negima” album, encouraging all readers of their site to buy it. The manufacturer of the album has caught on to this 2chan thread, and has taken some kind of political responsibility. In other words, they reduced the price to 700 yen. This is thrilling and amazing, to say the least — in Japan, any full-length album of popular music tends to sell for 3,000 yen. If it’s animation- or game-related, it can sell for morbidly more, as game and animation fans tend to not mind paying exorbitant amounts above normal for things that let them prove to themselves how much they really love their favorite intellectual properties — things like little pewter figurines and oversized CD cases that contain nothing extra yet take up more prime shelf space. For 700 yen, you can have this new album; the goal is to place this admittedly shitty (yeah, I bought it) album at the top of the Oricon chart, where television cannot and will not ignore it. And if television ignores it then (the news seems to never mention 2ch lately), well — I do believe this will set a most, most excellent media law precedent.

And there are even more interesting things than this on the horizon.
reads “good luck train man!!”

The number-one movie in Japan last week (this week, alas, it is “Batman Begins,” which I have seen and will review here in the three words “Fucking,” “Bad,” and “Ass“) was “Denshaotoko,” meaning “train man.” “Denshaotoko” was a thread on 2chan.net last year, one that was hailed as “perhaps the greatest thread this board has ever seen” by users. The “Train Man” was a geeky Akihabara-loving guy who, according to the post he placed to start the thread, had seen a girl on the Chuo Line train out of Akihabara being harrased by a drunken businessman. With a great show of courage, he told the guy off, comforted the girl, and, says he, fell in love with her. He posted to 2channel asking for advice, and then, over the course of the next few weeks, chronciled his relationship with the girl. It’s an amazing story, I think, perhaps most amazing because (as I know for a dubious fact), most of it is complete bullshit. The Train Man is a fierce and mischievous liar. The story of the Train Man, which ends with him leaving behind his hobbies of 2channel trolling and fierce anime-goods-collection forever to pursue his love with the lucky girl, was edited and turned into a novel, which 2channel itself published, and that novel was turned into a screenplay and fashioned into a shiny movie which was viewed by, in addition to three or four Japanese people who had heard it was a sweet little story, theaters jam-packed with glasses-wearing men in their thirties who read 2channel incessently. It took a little more than 2channel’s push to make “Train Man” the number one movie in Japan. Even so, it is admirable and interesting.

Observe the self-subversion involved, here, if you will — the film, based on a novel published by 2channel, a haven of snickering, cynical otaku, is about the reformation, through love, of one such snickering otaku. Are you getting this? One could theorize that the movie and the whole “Train Man” story are a bastardization of the 2channel pride, a pack of lies about how geeks who know how to keep their geekiness “real” would turn his back on his geek culture. In the world of 2chan, where, yes, people slander celebrities in single lines of gibberish, as I’ve said before, this is a fair, dead-serious assessment. However, take into consideration the current goings-on with the subversion of the Oricon charts. There, 2channel is forcing its way into the pop-culture mainstream through doings best described as “antics.” These antics are wacky and outlandish enough to make the “Train Man” phenomenon standing right beside it go fairly unnoticed. Yet “Train Man” is getting huger and huger. It’s sweeping the nation. Polished into novel form and thrown up on a big screen, it looks good and flows well. Cultural optimists would tell you, hey, that’s the power of a good story. Oh, bullshit — that’s the power of exposure. The publishing and entertainment industries these days are kind of rough around the edges; it’s not what you know, or how you know it, it’s who you know and how often you drink with them. 2chan users argue regularly that there’s little soul in the pop-culture that’s schlocked out onto Japanese record store shelves or movie theaters. Most of what there gets there based on quantity of 10,000-yen-bills, not quality of entertainment.

What do their own snickering forays into the world of pop-culture superstardom, then, mean in the grand scheme of things? They call their antics involving the Oricon charts a “revolution,” though really, what’s it going to change, in the long run? Is it going to make anime huge again? I don’t really see how. A lot of the anime on television these days is utter dreck; 2channel users will probably admit in person they don’t enjoy it as much as they just pretend to, because they don’t want to subscribe to fandom in “normal” television or pop music. That’s as noble as anything. Greedy men and noble men, free men and lonely men of Rome conspire to build an empire that eventually collapses; thousands of years later guys browsing a plain text internet message board decide to like one kind of dreck more than another kind, merely because the people who like the other dreck don’t like the people who like the other kind. What a peace-loving world we live in.

I believe, and quite strongly, in the power of the undeniable. When I was nine years old, my teacher was asking us all what we wanted to do in the future. Some said they wanted to be doctors or lawyers, or specific types of engineers. I merely said, “I want to make something undeniable.” I suppose I haven’t given up on that yet. I don’t imagine I will; I’ve gone this far wielding that dream, and I don’t suppose I’ll give up without seeing it through to the finish. There’s something about the undeniable — virtuosity, we can call it — in things like the animated series “Cowboy Bebop.” I’d like to see 2chan throw that into the mainstream. It is something that everyone in Japan should rightly enjoy. It is above and beyond, heads and shoulders and nose, anything that has floated to the top of the Japanese popstream in the past decade. If they make it available, and cheaply, they might cause something to get started. Right now, all they’re doing, still, is fooling around.

The Japanese Revolution continues to move, and I do wager it’s picking up steam. Normally elitists who stand apart from Japanese television drama series, 2chan is now entangled in one such drama series — based on the “Train Man” thread, again. The series is called “Train Man.” The first episode airs on the Seventh of July — the day of the Tanabata Festival — and it begins at ten PM on Fuji Television. If you’re in Japan, by all means check it out. I have a cameo appearance in each episode, for a good and totally unexpected reason we won’t spoil here, or probably anywhere, if you know what I mean.

The opening and closing theme songs of the program are performed by yours and my favorite band, Sambo Master. Sambo Master is on the Sony Music label; back when Orange Range’s new album came out, Sambo Master’s new album came out, too. Thanks to ten million dollars in promotions, Orange Range hit number one, and their fans wear “Orange Range” T-shirts at Orange Range arena shows. Thanks to ten thousand dollars in promotions, Sambo Master hit number eleven on the charts. They are all too familiar with the politics of popularity, and the numbers that come with it all. It makes them the perfect choice for the show’s music, I think. Last night, we filmed the ending sequence that will appear on every episode of the show, at Akihabara Station, on the Chuo Line platform. The young Japanese man who will play Train Man was standing on the platform across from me, a hundred extras, and Sambo Master, with a garish bag from GAMERS with a poster sticking out, checked shirt tucked into his khakis, belt all straight and perfect, shoes pointing forward, expression on his face like Andrew Vestal. Since we filmed this in the middle of the damn night — three in the morning, to be exact, when the station was closed — all of the shutters on the convenience kiosks are closed, making it look merely like it’s after ten o’clock. Train Man is waiting alone for his train. Then he looks up, and notices there’s a rock and roll show going on across from him, and Sambo Master is rocking that show. Eventually, he ends up rocking on the other side of the platform with us, though how that happens is not important.

I hope the show does well. I’m pretty sure I will.

It’s most important, however, to note that the many participants on the “Train Man” thread, whether they were advising a pathological liar or a gifted storyteller or a man confused about love or all of those rolled into one, behaved as real human beings do, and they were only able to do this because they didn’t know one another’s names. As namesless beings, they conducted themselves with the utmost honor and respect, and though they joked and said lewd things from time to time, they showed compassion and valor, all in the context of plain text on a pink background. Lord bless them.

I’m going to start writing a novel in English next week, one about, among other things, information flow and masturbation as an Olympic event two hundred years in the future. I have all of the details planned out in my head to a point where I understand it will be the first book I write in English that will be worth publishing. I also know I will be able to publish it. It’s no trouble. I’ve gone over it with, among other people, Japanese science-fiction authors and Hideo Kojima. I’m taking it so seriously I might even wear a suit while I write it. I’m buying a new computer just to write it, probably a giant Dell one.

I was telling a Japanese science-fiction author about it last night. I also told him about my latest Japanese novel, which is going to be published relatively soon. We got to talking about the gimmicky epistolary novels flooding the Japanese “literary fiction” market these days, and this of course led to a discussion of “Train Man.” We talked about it uneasily for a little bit, and then this guy leaned in and said to me, “You want to know something, though?” He whispered, “I am the train man.” He was the spitting image of Sambo Master’s Takashi Yamaguchi, though a little chubbier. I laughed at the guy. Another guy, also short and chubby with glasses and sideburns like Yamaguchi (okay, so everyone there was, more or less, except the token white guy, me), leaned in and said, “No you’re not — I am.” All these guys were from some iteration of 2chan; they probably would have never met and discussed their hobbies were it not for the shooting. Only, hey — it’s not like they know each other on the board, or anything. It’s a godamned huge board.

Ahh, yes, still translating manga. I’ll translate another volume tomorrow, I think. And from then . . . I don’t know. I am going to move soon. I’ve lived in poverty long enough. I guess it’s time to, like Batman, accept my fortune and begin my life of crime-fighting. I’ll also post a review of Drag-on Dragoon 2, which is actually a pretty damned good game, amazingly, considering the shit-stack of its predecessor.

Hey, I have another short story, too. It’s the last one I will write before starting the novel. It’s the final one in the “X days before Mount Fuji erupted” series, and it’s called “the exact moment this exact moment stopped happening.” If you paypal a small sum (usually a dollar and eight cents or a multiple thereof) to tim(at)insertcredit(dot)com, I’ll let you on the SECRET URL list to see it. As a bonus, here, I’ll link you to one of last month’s stories, which is about Sambo Master and the revolution in Japanese rock and roll. The link is here. I guess the link should, kind of, function as proof that, when I ask people to paypal a little money, I really do put up content. This story was one of three pieces I put up last time, hey! That’s a lot of content! That entertains you for a day, or more! Also, note that if you read this story and are entertained enough by it to want to, I don’t know, send some money just in appreciation, I don’t mind that, and I’ll probably email you with my thanks.

So yeah. That concludes this installment. I’m hungry. Who else is hungry? I’m going to get some bread, and some blueberry jam, and just sit here eating it. I was in the grocery store a few days ago, looking at a jar of blueberry jam with a gold cap, a kind I saw in a married woman’s house once a year ago and thought was really good. Had a bad headache and a coughing condition, so I was just staring at it for a while until I realized I had enough money to buy it and, more than that, I could even afford it. So I bought it and a can of Coke, went home, opened the balcony door, and sat there on the straw mat in my yukata (finally bought one of those, too, after a damned decade of “thinking about it”), listening to taxis and rain, eating a big drippy blueberry jam sandwich and drinking Coke. It wasn’t bad. See — if I could do that every day, without anyone else telling me what to do, that’d be perfect. I couldn’t ask for anything more.

So it seems that I’m going to have a small role in a Sambo Master music video filming next week. Seeing as they’re on the verge of finally being a huge hit, this will probably be the first music video of theirs to get reasonably wide play. Meaning . . . I’m going to be on TV a lot next month. Be sure to tune in!

The video will film in, I shit you not, the streets of Akihabara, pretty much every night after midnight next week. Those are all the details I know. Akihabara after midnight is a creepy-as-hell place. I mean, everything is closed and all that. Hmmm.

And I am sick again. I don’t know why this keeps happening. I had a job interview scheduled for two weeks ago, you see. They told me I’d “come in sometime this week,” and then they didn’t call or anything. They ended up calling me on my birthday, when I was near dead. They said, “Can you come out to Akasaka Mitsuke and interview right now?” And I said, no, I’m sick. They said they’d call back later, and I believed them. Well, they didn’t. Oh, well. It makes you wonder. I guess they don’t like things like that, telling them you’re too sick to interview. They should have called a week earlier! Or, you know what? I’m a man of reasonably high pain tolerance — if they would have told me the interview was the day after my birthday, I would have been able to mentally prepare myself. Well. They didn’t have the courtesy to do that, either. I guess they’re not going to call, then. That’s really bitchy of them. They even have the URL to this site, so maybe the guy who called me is reading this paragraph right now, and nodding, “Yeah, that was really bitchy of me.”

I’m not sure what my illness is right now. Maybe it’s meningitis. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about the way I feel, other than that I feel this way. Look — look here, I just don’t feel like eating. If you had to know the truth, that’s what I’d tell you, that I don’t feel like eating. I consider that a marked change from, well, most every other day. I’m no glutton; usually, though, I feel like eating something. Last night I made some penne in pepperoncino, home-made style, with just olive oil, garlic, and red peppers. It ended up tasting pretty good. I had to force it down my throat, though. I mean, I wouldn’t have forced it down if I didn’t know it was going to go down, if you know what I mean. That’s awful courteous of our stomachs, isn’t it? When there’s something wrong with them, all you have to do is think about a food and you’ll know within three seconds (if that telling rumble sounds) if you’re going to be able to eat it or not. “Cabbage? You want some raw cabbage?” “Um . . . no. Lord no.” “How about yogurt?” “. . . Yeah, I could go for some yogurt.” And your stomach is always right, when it comes to what you can eat. Or at least mine is.

There was a trailer for a movie on television last night, a movie starring that one woman whose name I can never remember. Julianne Moore? Anyway, the trailer asks a simple question — “What would you do if everything you knew was a lie?!?!?!?!?” I thought, well, son, that’s a good question. I guess I wouldn’t do anything. I’d just need a few days to reacquaint myself with the world.

Then I thought about the question a little more deeply. It’s actually a far gentler question than it at first seems. The Blue Hearts ask the same question in the first line of their song “Rose of Passion,” and numerous movies of science-fiction and romantic comedy distinctions alike ask that question. It’s an important question for cutting-edge pop culture to ask, these days, because everything we do know is a lie. Or, at least, a largely fabricated half-truth. The girl on the magazine cover isn’t beautiful so much as she’s been carefully selected by educated men sitting around a large table to appeal to us exactly the way we are being appealed to; in this way, can you really say you’re attracted to a supermodel or a pop idol, or that you’re simply, by looking at her, enrolling in a 100-level course for how to look at her? It’s a beginner’s world, we’re looking at; for example: a long, long time ago, only the brightest people, the ones with creative sparks and ideas were able to go to college, where they wrote dissertations expounding their ideas and were so celebrated as academics that rural bumpkins got the idea that college was as large and important a part of the American (or whereverian) Dream as producing your own food and owning your own shotgun. Now anyone anywhere can go to college, and we have all these little systems and failsafes set up so that anyone can get in and get out within four years. We have people employed to give speeches to freshmen entering a state college, telling them “less than half of you will graduate.” Is even that true? I was having an argument with a punk-rocker, of all people, one whose band, a band called The Sanyons, had just broken up in most impromptu fashion, that the Japanese education system was a hundred times more useless than the American one. There was this show on television where famed celebrities had to point out prefectures on a map of Japan, proving how little they knew of their own country’s geography. The program existed to humorously demonstrate how dumb these celebrities were by stumping them with questions from a middle-school entrance exam. Yet, when the map was flipped and world geography became the subject, the red pens started finding the right places. New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, Texas. The celebrities knew these things. One joked that the location of Trinidad and Tobago had been on his college entrance exam. “How did you do on the exam?” “Well, I didn’t go to college, if that’s what you’re asking.” Uproarious laughter. I told this punk-rocker kid about this, and about how in America anyone can graduate from college if they have enough money and four years to throw away, and how there’s just no creativity or spark in any of it unless you’re dealing with graduate students, and even then you get some people denser than others. I asked a graduate-studying girl at my university once what her thesis was about and she cussed me out. “Fuck if I know!” She was slightly drunk and studying psychology. She’ll make a wonderful mother.

The punk-rocker didn’t buy any of this. He said that the Japanese system is at least cautious in who is allowed in to a college; the entrance exams are world-renowned as atrociously difficult. I couldn’t believe my ears, that this kid in leather was defending his country’s biggest bullshit factory. I realized why his band had been shot in the head that night; it wasn’t a dispute between members or anything like that — it was just a general lack of common sense all around. They’d caved in from it. “Once you get in to a Japanese college, all you do is pose your way through the classes,” I told the kid. “Sure, there are some bright people — I saw on TV some kids at Azabu High School, one of whom was going into Tokyo University next year, he said he wanted to be a ‘researcher’ in the future and he was dead-serious — though for the most part people go to college to get their ticket punched. I’m saying — why not start punching people’s tickets for free? Make a standardized test, and if you can pass that, you win?” The kid’s defense, and he says this at age twenty, two years after graduating high school and doing nothing more than a rock band in that time, “Because people aren’t ready for the real world at eighteen,” he said. “They need, oh, four years to grow and mature.” What if that’s another thing people just, you know, tell people? It struck me that kids in Japanese colleges are like people making hollow chocolate Easter Bunnies, and people like this punk-rocker are throwing darts at the chocolate Easter Bunnies the college students are making, though they never hit. What would that look like, or feel like, to hit a hollow chocolate Easter Bunny with a thrown dart? And furthermore, could I eat a chocolate Easter Bunny right now?

. . . no.

Fuck what you think you know. If you live in America, look around yourself at all the fat people. You know how they got that fucking fat? By believing what they know. The reason science-fiction has poked at the idea of this world being virtual and packed full of lies for these past three decades is because, well, baby, that’s pretty much what it is. A woman on a diet believes the chocolate bars she’s eating are full of energy that will sustain her throughout the day while, at the same time, tasting great, and she also knows that M&M Peanuts only contain X grams of fat, which means it’s okay for her to eat Y of them. People like this end up getting their problem on a leash, and no more. Then the problem starts leading them down back alleys where muggers itch to steal purses. I can tell you how to lose weight, I can tell you how to live healthy — my children, I can tell you how to live forever, and that is to have some common sense. You can do this by sitting in the middle of the floor cross-legged, breathing. If you know who you are and what you are, you know how far you can go and what you need to survive. Working for a company, contributing positively to their quarterly sales reports and being rewarded accordingly for it is a fictional way to live; alone, on a floor, in the real world is the ideal. I can play my guitar when I want to, watch television when I want to, I can drink Fanta Orange when I want to and drink Fanta Grape when I want to. I can listen to what music I want and read what books I want. I exist, here, as a consumer, as one of The Entertained, willing to do little more than take in all this too-much entertainment the world has made for the people who otherwise have things to do. It’s with a little sadness that I realize and admit people like myself are dangerous to the rest of the world. I suppose we’re multiplying. People who refuse to do anything of value to society. Can you blame us? So many words have been spoken and written down over the last four centuries that those with a good skim-readers knowledge of how, exactly, things were and how things are, combined with a helping of common sense, naturally aren’t going to want to do anything. You’ll get cancer from this! You’ll get cancer from that! You’ll get cancer from your mobile phone! You’ll get AIDS from the water in Mexico! Those eggs are full of the bad cholestorol! Cousin X’s daughter just matriculated at Princeton! I hear Princeton’s a good school! I mean, I’ve heard its name before! You know what the world needs? It needs a good content-editing. Let’s make a new college, one the name of which will never be revealed, it’ll be that elite. What do you think? The train we’re riding, boys, only has one destination. I’d like to explain this all in a story, or a novel; the problem is finding the right way to sugar-coat it, you know, give it a good presentation. Maybe make the hero a detective who asks himself in the beginning, “What if everything I ever learned was a . . . lie?” That’d fly off the shelves.



I’m getting dozens of emails about my Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song review, calling me either brain-dead or “disgustingly heterosexual.” I’m going to take a stance right here: gay people on the internet: I don’t like it when you email me telling me I’m too heterosexual about a fucking videogame review. Am I the only person who gets these kinds of emails? Someone tell me I’m not; someone tell me that anyone with a Geocities “this is me, my house, and my dog” photo website gets these gay ninjas popping out of the woodwork and calling them disgusting in their heterosexuality. What’s the point of it? Where’s the sense? You people are supposed to be the champagne-sipping, art-enlightened ones, yet you persist in being unable to leave well enough alone when it comes to a guy talking about a Japanese videogame on his own damned website. Some things just shouldn’t be said, maybe, and maybe these things are some of them. Either way, it bothers and disturbs me when I’m berated by a man whose name I don’t know for refusing to acknowledge “the homosexual perspective” in a game like Romancing SaGa, about warriors killing monsters with swords and axes. You know, if I were gay, I’d not have a hard time at all acknowledging — or, shit, even inventing a homosexual perspective to fit anything. As much as I am liberal about things like gay people — go ahead! be gay! frolic . . . gaily! — I also have the book-learnedness to know that if a homosexual asks me, “Well, how do you know heterosexuality is right?” he’s either uneducated or educated and trying something he thinks is clever. I know for a fact, sirs, that heterosexuality is right because it produces babies, and animals seem to need to be able to do that to qualify as animals. Yet I don’t berate you for being genetically mistaken in this fashion; I understand that human beings do a great deal of things wrong, historically, as well as I understand that I have teeth designed for ripping apart the flesh of other animals and I never use them for that purpose. We do so many things wrong that everyone, at some point in their life, settles down and believes that they’re doing everything right, and this allows them to buy a house and procreate and gain peace of mind. And someone, somewhere, who’s thinking the same thing, cuts a movie trailer that asks the audience, “What if everything you knew was a lie?!?!?!?!?” probably thinking little of what he’s doing. He probably doesn’t even think he’s being funny.

Akitoshi Kawazu is the dreck-king of game-developers, and his latest offering is . . . “his best game to date. It’s just still not very good. At all.” Join Classic Tim Rogers as he reviews one game, and an entire series — it’s Square-Enix’s Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song for Sony PlayStation2.

Fear!!

A few days ago, while I was writing a reply to a post on the insertcredit.com forums, my account was deleted. Just moments later, Aderack’s was deleted, and then all of the administrators. What had basically happened was that a little boy, apparently named Alex Vinson and living in Indianapolis, Indiana, took control of one of the admin accounts and used it to delete all the other admins, effectively giving him control of the board. Because the only person with the password that accessed the database and would have allowed us to reset the admin password and regain control was away from his computer in a small town by the sea, the little boy was then moved to delete the entire forums after we ignored him for three days.

Should we have ignored him? I think either doing so or not doing so would have ended in the same result. Aderack and I were pretending that we’d deleted our accounts so as to “attain the next level,” and many forum members were buying it, from what I could tell. It seemed like something we’d do, at any rate — delete our names and post counts and everything, and just start fresh.

Well, it looks like there’s going to be a lot of starting fresh to do. Once the forum comes back — it might take a while, is all we’re saying for now — it’ll be a little more secure. I urge everyone who participated in the original forums to participate in this one, just because to give up now would be kind of stupid. I know you’re tough people and you wouldn’t give up just because of one forum apocalypse. This was the best forum we’ve yet had on the site, of the three we’ve had. Let’s go ahead and make the next one nice as well. Let’s not try to worry about topping ourselves or anything. Let’s just go with it.

For the meantime, I have a forum here, you know. You can post there if you need to post something somewhere these next couple of weeks.

In closing, I must say I’m actually proud I was the first account deleted. It shows that the boy who did so thought he was making an example by deleting me. It shows that he believed and understood I was the king of those forums, that he deleted me first. I started a new account right away, not caring in the least about my post count, even though I’m sure he thought I cared about my post count. He’s probably also the type to listen to Marilyn Manson in a dark room. Hey, why don’t you steal your dad’s shotgun and go shoot up your school? Say the insertcredit.com forums made you do it, write a big long suicide letter in blue Bic pen on your wide-ruled notebook about how my review of Metal Gear Solid 3, once hailed by Andrew Vestal on Gaming-Age as able to make you hate the game if you love it, drove you to depressed madness? Be sure to be very clear and include many mentions of the URL. I’ve been accused by Slashdotters of being “like Hitler,” though I’ve never driven a dumb fucking asshole kid to kill people before. Do it! Murder in my name! Let’s see you do it! I could use the publicity! I’d love that kind of publicity! Prove you have some real balls, and aren’t just some kid who can click a mouse, deleting intelligent(ish) discussion about videogames!

. . . All you saddened by the death of the forums, you’ll be glad perhaps to know that I’m going to try to put a game review up in these pages today. I’ll link it at the end of this post, when I’m done editing it up to speed. I mean, it’s just been sitting on this hard drive forever. Might as well put it somewhere.

Later.

Well, since the last episode, I’ve been violently ill. Throwing up, massive fever, diarrhea. It’s been horrible. I didn’t eat anything since writing that last entry, believe it or not. Well, I ate a piece of toast an hour ago, though I threw that up. We can thank the up-throwing of that toast for giving me the inspiration to turn on the computer and write something. What about, who knows. Or maybe I’ll just go take a shower.

I JUST TOOK A SHOWER

Every time I want to take a shower, I have to go next door and ask the old lady who lives there if I can use her shower. She owns this entire building, you see. Why does she choose to live in a little one-room apartment? Well, simple — because she lets her daughter, her daughter’s daughter, and her daughter’s daughter’s boyfriend live in the sprawling, virtual ninja-fortress of a downstairs apartment. That apartment takes up the whole of the second floor. The third floor is five little apartments, rented out only to family and friends. Actually, one of them is rented out to no one at the moment. Just 65,000 yen a month. Really nice place, too. No deposit, no key money. If you don’t mind living in a sex district. I was thinking of taking the place myself, since I’m making money now, because it’s better than the one I’m in right now (which costs only 25,000 a month for a reason, buddy), though I guess I kind of decided against it. I just want to get out of this place, and go somewhere civilized, like Akabane or Ikebukuro. Somewhere that knows how to mix its seediness and metropolitanism together, not like this place, with its far-off hidden back-alley-filled sex district. The Senzoku is an odd one, you know — Kabukicho, in Shinjuku, you see, happens to have McDonalds, and movie theaters, and restaurants. Senzoku is sex only. The grocery store is a hell of a walk. You know.

And I live in the company of these kooky people. Don’t ask me how I met them. They all seem to despise me and hate the fact that I live in this shitty little tiny room in here. When I get sick, they just scream at me and tell me to get a job. I tell them I do have a job, and they tell me, well, you should wear a suit! It’s a wonderful working environment. Well, anyway, the old woman and her niece were watching the soccer game; both of them normally just sit around talking about Korean television drama serials. To hear them speaking in soccer technical terms is a true testament to Japanese ingenuity. These people love a good temporary hobby. There’s a soccer game on television, and the streets clear, and the people all sit in at home or in bars staring at the game. Well, the real soccer fans stare. The rest of the population, in their just-bought fake jerseys, drink beers and babble about everything. “The grass is greener than it was last time,” the old woman’s niece said. Yeah, I bet! Or maybe there’s something wrong with your giant TV.

My lord, the streets really are empty tonight. I don’t think I have it in me to go outside. I had a lot of plans for this week, for translating things, writing things, and eating curry at my own damned birthday party. They all fell through because of a 104-degree fever and violent toilet usage. Tell me, how does diarrhea persist when you haven’t eaten anything in three days? Shouldn’t the gastrointestinal tract be rightfully empty by then? Yet there’s still stuff coming out! It’s not much, granted, though it’s still something! What differentiates diarrhea from anal discharge? Is it volume, or texture, or chemical makeup, or what? Is there even such a thing as anal discharge? There has to be, I mean, people discharge things from their eyes, don’t they?

For the first time ever, I was sick on my birthday. I couldn’t stand up (though of course I did when diarrhea seized me) and I certainly couldn’t walk (just a few stumbles to the bathroom), and I most certainly couldn’t ride a train to Shibuya to eat curry which I’d just vomit up anyway. I’d feel confident in saying that WE WILL HAVE THAT CURRY-PARTY-OCCASION, PROBABLY NEXT MONDAY OR TUESDAY, MARK MY WORDS. Watch this space, or just email me on my cellular phone for an invitation and details. You know who you are!

FINALLY, A CONTEST

As an internet entertainer, I’ve learned why and how I can best reward my readers — with MONEY — and by letting them entertain me first. So here’s what you do. Get out your microphones and sound recorders and record the following monologue in each of three voices. The three voices are:

1. excited sports announcer
2. shakespearean character
3. television newsanchor gravely reading a terrorist’s threat, or else a famed someone’s suicide letter

The monologue is this:

“My ass. My ass. My ass. Holy shit — my fucking ass smells like hatred.”

Go to it, boys. Email me the files!! Dr.Ian is barred from NOT participating. Dr.Ian, I hope you’re watching this.

I’m going to eat tofu now, and then take a couple of shits.



Last year around this time, I wrote an entry in my old livejournal about how I needed donations from people because “the dot-com bubble has burst” and all this other bullshit. Some guy commented on that, and asked me if I really wanted to thrust myself into the same league as Enron and Worldcom or whatever, and I gave him this bullshit answer. It was like art, is what it was like. It was like fucking with the mainstream. I don’t even remember what I said. It was powerful stuff.

Tuesday is my birthday. I guess this much is to be expected. I mean, a birthday comes once a year, as long as you don’t die before it. My birthday last year starred me as a homeless person. My birthday this year will star me as a guy with a home (kind of) and a computer with no goddammed mouse unless I go out and get a mouse tomorrow. I think I will. I’ll walk down to Akihabara and find a mouse in one of those shady-looking computer stores. I’ve got a mouse right here, a wireless Kokuyo Fit Mouse, and I really like the way it feels — it just doesn’t work with this computer. I found it in a box in this house, all packaged up. The explanation was that it had been there for a year, and just never opened. Once a dubious spring broke inside the shitty plastic mouse I’ve been using for a couple of months now (I use it to click on “color change” in WordPad and change the colors of the lines of manga text I’m translating) and the thing started rattling and eventually left me for dead, I broke out the slick wireless mouse and tried to get it working. Of course it didn’t work. Four hours is what I spent trying to find a driver or something. The official site refuses to acknowledge the notion that you might have trouble with the thing once you get it home. The box says it should work with Windows 98, and the box is a filthy liar.

The mouse looks like this.



It’s not so complicated. I kept doing Google searches on it, thinking I’d come up with some Japanese blog that listed similar problems. Nothing, though. The most I found was some blog exemplary in its inanity, which features an entry wherein the name of the mouse is, as in most English publications, somehow mis-translated as “Fist Mouse,” and the blogger, one of those “oh I’m a girl and I don’t get technology watch me wisecrack” types, has this to say:

The Kokuyo Fist Mouse: will someone tell me exactly how you work this thing?

I had the same question; yet I think my question was in a different context. I mean, I think she was just being an asshole and joking about the way the mouse looks. I wanted to comment on there, yet held myself back: It’s a fucking mouse. It works like a fucking mouse. It has fucking buttons and you fucking move it to move the fucking cursor. Don’t be a fucking asshole. I didn’t do this because, hey, it wouldn’t have been nice, and it’s my birthday on Tuesday. In the context of birthdays, at this time of the year when I feel like I’m kind of growing up, I decide not to do things like that. You know.

I THINK I’M GOING TO HAVE A BIRTHDAY PARTY OF SOME SORT. On Tuesday night. Anyone who’s in Tokyo and reading this is welcome to attend. Drew, Nick, Kevin, FFD, all of you goosey bastards can come. Even icycalm can come! And Jordan, of course! And . . . whoever else. And I’ll try to invite the woman, too. She needs to get out. I guess, for the party, we’ll just . . . curry buffet? We’ll eat the curry buffet in Shibuya? That’d be good? I could go for some curry buffet, and I haven’t had a real meal (in other words, a meal that pushes my stomach up against my lungs) since getting back from Los Angeles.

Ahh, Los Angeles. I feel like I wasted my last day in Los Angeles. Persona was all like, “You want to go to Denny’s?” This was what we’d planned. And I was all like, “No, I’m tired.” And I fell asleep on his sofa. What a waste! He should have kicked me. I needed some French toast up in me, right then and there. That would have woken me up!

In the end, I ended up here. And it’s now raining like a maniac with a butcher knife, running up and down the streets of Shitamachi. Shitamachi on a rainy day in early June; it’s something I’ve seen before, and something I’ll see again. Probably tomorrow. An hour ago, I was about to step out and walk to the grocery store and buy some Coke, some yogurt (okay, so the yogurt was added ten minutes ago), and a package of little donuts when the rain just came out of nowhere and started pointing its finger at everyone. So now I’m stuck in here, reading through mails on my cellular phones. Japanese people I haven’t talked to in weeks, mostly. They see the rain as an opportunity to email and ask how I am.

It’s raining like a son of a bitch, isn’t it?
How was your trip to Los Angeles?

I tell them that the rain is like a son of a bitch and a bastard riding in the same getaway car, and that Los Angeles was alright, if a little too fast for my tastes.

And now my job, my work, my opportunity to earn bags of cash is compromised by this mouse ball. To think, a sphere of rubber — and the little spring that holds it in place — is keeping me from thousands of dollars. Oh well.

I was looking through my phone when I found two pictures, one I’d taken in Shinjuku the day I bought the plane tickets, and the other I’d taken in America. And I was thinking: the dot-com bubble is mending. The world economy is stabilizing. WORLD WAR III IS COMING

This is an article called the State of Wayne. I realize that Tim wrote a series of articles called State of Tokyo, and I’ve heard them mentioned in passing several times, but know this:

I’ve never read a State of Tokyo article. This point becomes important later on in the story.

So anyways, I used to be a high school senior. I’m all graduated and shit now, though. So I guess the two questions I get asked the most are “So, do you miss school?” and “So, is your hair naturally curly?” The answers to those two questions are No and Yes, I leave the task of figuring which answer belongs to which question to you, the reader.

But yeah, things are very different now from several months ago. I wake up generally around 10 or 11, as opposed to 6, in the morning. I watch Oprah, play guitar, and teach English. Oprah, in particular, tends to be the highlight of my day. Sometimes I surf the web, thinking about how my friends are all working for minimum wage as typists at an SAT school, content in knowing that I, who work only two hours a day, make more than they do in their grueling 12 hour days.

This is how I’m winding down the time before the time comes for me to leave this country behind and start a new life in college, in America. Also, due to legal reasons, I might not be able to come back until I’m around age 40. Right now, I’m 17. That’s a good 23 years before they let me back here. I’m wondering if I’m missing anything now that I should do before I leave. Although, I think while I’m still a student, I’m allowed to come back. Something like that.

That being said, the State of Wayne is fairly good these days. I’ve been watching my Oprah, which is always a good thing. I recently discovered they don’t even play Sesame Street anymore. Instead, AFN broadcasts some abomination known as Play with Me, Sesame. It’s a bastardization of the original show in that it uses all the original characters of Sesame Street, but doesn’t contain any of the cool psychedelic animations. You know, shit with transforming numbers and letters.

More than anything, though, they don’t have Elmo’s World.

I guess it’s all part of this new phase in children’s programming to create pseudo-interactive television shows. Stuff like “How many birds are in the tree?” followed by a long pause of up to 10 seconds (because stupid kids like puppets too). The idea is that you’re supposed to answer during the pause. Big Bird and Bert and Ernie are all waiting there, standing stock still, waiting waiting waiting for your reply. Then there’s some line like “Let’s count them together!”

1.

2.

3.

4.

5!!

“That’s right, there are FIVE birds sitting in the tree! *Birds fly in while others fly out* How many are in the tree now??”

I think you get the idea by now.

So the State of Wayne is, in part, alot about absence. There are a lot of things missing in my life this year that I used to have last year. Last summer, I would wake up at 9 o’clock every morning, and watch the Elmo’s World segment of Sesame Street before eating a leisurely breakfast and then heading out to teach for the day. I mostly taught English to middle school students by talking about things like Elmo’s World, and how he always brings out a baby to answer a question. And how the baby never really answers, but just sits and looks around, like those quiet babies that you never get to meet do. The babies you do meet, well, they’re less than pleasant.

I learned alot about absence during my time in Japan. I learned about what happens in the absence of towels - what you do is head down to the nearest convenience store and buy yourself a value pack of three handkerchief towels for five hundred yen, because that’s the only option you have. Now, more than two months later, I’m realizing what happens in the absence of Indian curry buffets. Drew, Kevin, Tim, you are all lucky men to live in a town with a curry buffet.

Of course, the State of Wayne is also a lot about gain. I’ve grown a lot of hair since last year, when I was the closest to having a shaved head that I have ever been. Now, it’s mostly a curly mane, as evidenced by the contest pictures everyone must have seen. If you haven’t, go back and look at the archives, sometime around March or April, it was. So yeah, I’ve got that going on. I also have, in my possession, a Skylark Gusto drink bar cup. This was from the same Skylark Gusto in which I ate a Hamburger Steak… WITH EGG, but without rice. That was certainly an interesting experience.

The last night I was in Japan, however, I went to a small restaurant outside of Ukimafunado station, a place where the salarymen stop by on their way home from the office. It’s the kind of place where you eat when you’ve been out late on the job and know there’s no dinner waiting for you at home. Well, I knew that Drew and Kevin sure as hell weren’t going to cook me anything, so I decided to stop in and have me a hamburger steak. I didn’t know how to speak enough Japanese to really indicate what it was that I wanted, so I pointed to a poster hanging on the wall with a picture of a hamburger steak on it. Not only that, I ordered what might have been the set or some shit, because I got a bowl of miso soup and (cue gasp) rice with my hamburger steak, as well as a small salad I didn’t much care for. But I ate it all; I hadn’t eaten all day.

Now, it would appear I am standing at the edge of some kind of horizon. It’s the end of high school; it’s the end of May. The State of Wayne is something that shifted several times - an infinite number of times, really - and is something that will continue to shift. The State of Wayne is similar to the State of Tokyo: certain parts continue to grow, others wither, and no one can keep track of everything. But really, what is to be done?